The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit has upheld the constitutionality of gay marriage bans in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This is the first federal appellate court ruling against same-sex marriage since the 2013 Defense of Marriage Act decision by the Supreme Court and virtually guarantees an eventual SCOTUS ruling on the matter.

President Barack Obama will meet for lunch today with congressional leaders, including the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate. No, that won't be awkward.

"Republicans' big midterm wins throw a potential curveball at President Obama as he weighs his replacement for outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder—forcing him to decide whether to introduce a nominee during the lame-duck session or take his chances with a more hostile Senate majority after January."

The senior leadership of the Navy SEALs is speaking out against the former SEAL who has come forward to say he shot Osama bin Laden.

Christopher Epps, the former head of the Mississippi Corrections Commission, has been charged with accepting more than $700,000 in bribes.

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And after suffering through a painful second term of President Bush, my hope was delivered in the form of Barack Obama. I connected with candidate Obama on such a personal and symbolic level ? not to mention a redemptive one ? that his campaign and its culmination became the highlight of my standing as an American citizen. The fact that America could produce and recognize such an amazing leader validated the theory of American exceptionalism, which I’d been embracing since my Italian days. Even my cynical Italian friends were impressed and inspired.

Little did any of us know that the hilarity of the failed Palin bid for vice president would somehow embolden the extremists, while the Republican establishment would be so frightened of an Obama presidency that together they’d usher in an era of American absurdity and obstructionism ? one that propelled us as a nation not toward a shining beacon of democracy, but a parody republic. It was hard to watch. So hard, that I had to tune out after the reelection of President Obama, a victory not nearly as sweet and meaningful as the first, considering the circus the Republicans offered this time as a harbinger to their continued truculence regardless of the results.

“I connected with candidate Obama on such a personal and symbolic level ? not to mention a redemptive one ? that his campaign and its culmination became the highlight of my standing as an American citizen. The fact that America could produce and recognize such an amazing leader validated the theory of American exceptionalism, which I’d been embracing since my Italian days. Even my cynical Italian friends were impressed and inspired.”

Is that racism? Are you not attracted to them because of their ethnicity:

Correct. Black women look uncomfortably similar to black men. The features specific to the various sub-Saharan ethnicities, I find most unappealing. So generally speaking I do look at black women and say to myself; “gross”. I’m just not attracted to them and there’s nothing wrong with that. Racism isn’t always pure evil is the point, because even innocuous preferences qualify for that moniker.

OK. I don’t know if I would necessarily call that “racism”. But some people would, I’m sure. I try to make a distinction between personal preferences and broad observations about different racial groupings, and the stupid kind of racism where people think that their prejudices about racial groupings (whether true or false) allow them to assume things about individuals based on race.

OK. I don’t know if I would necessarily call that “racism”. But some people would, I’m sure.

Tell a black woman that you don’t find her and those of her phenotype to be at all attractive and I suspect she’ll color you a racist. But so what? Not all racists and forms of racism are created equal.

I try to make a distinction between personal preferences and broad observations about different racial groupings, and the stupid kind of racism where people think that their prejudices about racial groupings (whether true or false) allow them to assume things about individuals based on race.

It’s a fair distinction to make, I agree. But it sounds like you don’t want to use the word “racism” to describe preferential differentiation because the word “racism” is loaded with all sorts of negative connotations. However the ickiness of a word shouldn’t deter us from applying it without prejudice.

“I connected with candidate Obama on such a personal and symbolic level ? not to mention a redemptive one ? that his campaign and its culmination became the highlight of my standing as an American citizen. The fact that America could produce and recognize such an amazing leader validated the theory of American exceptionalism, which I’d been embracing since my Italian days”

What is up with the disturbing man crush so many people seem to have on this guy? They really act like he is the second coming of Christ or something.

I wasn’t a fan of president Bush, but were the Bush years really so bad for these people that the next president has to be seen as some sort of messiah? Is it the president’s race? Does the left just not the maturity to handle a black president? Is it the leftist language the president uses in his speeches that gives these writers multiple orgasms?

Frankly I just don’t get it, I’ve never felt that way about anyone, let alone someone I’ve never met.

I don’t think progressive really see this as “their” country. So much of what is typically associated with America comes from conservative culture. Obama inspired them because they thought he could give them an America that would be their own.

It is really weird. He was the Democratic candidate and provided a historic moment by being half black, so of course people were going to support him and of course people who don’t usually vote are going to come out to “be part of history”. But how are people still imagining that he is some sort of exceptional leader? It’s amazing how deeply partisans can convince themselves of bullshit like that.

That’s delicious, and putting the cart before the horse. The Palin candidacy was the expression of an emboldened constituency, not a manufactured event. But it’s a useful window into the writer’s mindset.

To Barrack Obama, our Sov’reign King, Who is the world’s salvation, All praise and homage do we bring And thanks and adoration. Barrack Obama, victor! Barrack Obama, ruler! Barrack Obama, Lord and redeemer!

The whole article is a shitlib mating call, but this part at the front was a prime candidate for shitthatdidnthappen.txt:

Over 2003 to 2004, I lived in Italy for a year. It was a politically tumultuous time in America, and I spent much of my time in Italy fielding questions from concerned Italians about what was going on in the States. There was concern about the flawed election results of 2000, America’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, and, of course, America’s response to the attacks of 9/11.

Yeah, I’m sure the average Italian spent their days worrying over America’s withdrawal from Kyoto. Sheesh, if these guys are going to write fabulist prose, at least make it sound realistic.

For everyone else in special operations forces, quiet professional is the rule. That’s why everyone else in sof hates on SEALS. They are great st making work out videos, starring in shifty action movies, or literally telling everyone, everytime in the bar who they are.

What a short sighted move for this guy to make. Getting a real job must be more difficult than he thought. I guess working out a lot isn’t all that impressive on a resume.

Exactly this. I’d think a guy who used to work for a Tier 1 outfit wouldn’t have a problem finding a job somewhere in one of the various and sundry clandestine organizations the US employs. Or maybe he’s just getting old and broken and he’s preparing to launch some tacticool ELITE SHOOTER DEFENSE TOTAL FORCE SYSTEM TACTICAL CONCEPTS course that he hopes the cops will pay him a bunch of money to teach.

It’s not a question a lot of scientists ponder out loud, but it’s key to much of life on Earth: Exactly how does the penis form? Today, two teams of researchers report having solved one part of this mystery, pinpointing how the organ gets its start in snake, lizard, mouse, and chick embryos. Now that they understand the penis’s origin, researchers can track its development in more detail to understand what drives it to follow a different path in females and become a clitoris. The finding doesn’t just answer a biological conundrum; it could also help millions of people born with genital malformations.

I just picture Putin sending tanks over the border just long enough to get Ukraine to make a stink about it and pull them out immediately before anyone can verify there presence. It’s like international Hokey-Pokey.

The Russian-language newspaper, Trust, is reporting that an actual lawmaker?albeit one with a history of strange ideas?has introduced to the State Duma a bill that proposes extending the greatness of Russian by having children using the sperm of Vladimir Putin. To the best of our research, the Observer is the first to translate this strange proposal into English.

“The essence of my proposition is simple”, says the Chairwoman Of Parliamentary Commission on Women’s affairs, Children and Family, Yelena Borisovna Mizoulina. “Each female citizen of Russia will be able to receive by mail the genetic material of the President, get pregnant from him and have a baby. These mothers will be receiving special allowances from the government.”

Did you know the original lyrics were about the hired (black) help dressing up in Harlem on their night off? If memory serves, the lyrics were only changed when the song was re-used in about 1946 for the movie Blue Skies which has the famous Fred Astaire dance number.

Gary Cooper wasn’t famous enough in 1930 when the song was originally written.

Is the future of flight? Concept images reveal how we’ll glide across the sky in electric aeroplanes by 2050

Aircraft will likely be electric by 2050, with biofuels used in the meantime Aeroplanes will probably have innovatively-shaped bodies because they won’t have to accommodate traditional propulsion systems They will have smarter, smaller computers on board, which by 2045 will surpass the brainpower equivalent to all human brains combined Radical innovation is necessary because air traffic is set to increase by seven fold by 2050 and greenhouse gas emissions by four fold

Even supposing electric energy storage gets good enough for large electric planes to work at all, how fast could they possibly go? Might as well just go back to Zeppelin style airships. What a stupid article.

Arnold Abott, 90, was charged for handing out food along with two other ministers Each faces 60 days in jail and a $500 fine Wednesdy Abbott and others served a four-course meal by the beach as a crowd of nearly 100 mostly homeless and volunteers cheered their arrival

Letting the rich keep their own money! It’s not fair! Inequality! The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer! Not taking is giving and not giving is taking! These people are homeless only because the rich are hoarding cash that the government could use to help the poor! Capitalism is a race to the bottom!

They ban people from leaving their belongings unattended, outlaw panhandling at medians and strengthen defecation and urination laws, according to Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless.

‘I’ve never seen a city pass so many laws in such a short period of time,’ said Stoops, who testified at a City Council hearing on the issue.

Read “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England”. The National government passed laws criminalizing harboring poor people in one’s home. When you turned out your tenants to avoid getting arrested and fined, they got arrested for vagrancy. Early in Liz’s reign, poor people basically had a choice of death by hanging or death by starvation.

Someone posted that idiotic (and debunked) photo/quote of Jimmy Carter about using tax dollars to help the poor in a christian nation a few days ago and I immediately thought of this story. I guess if you shut down the charities by force, you have no choice but to use tax dollars to help the poor. Proggie logic 101

Working on the premise he had taken an eighth of an ounce every day for 20 years, the sound engineer calculated that if you laid out the drug in a single snortable line, it would stretch for seven miles.

In August, Miller-Young was sentenced to community service, anger-management classes, and $493 in restitution to the teen she assaulted.

On March 4, Miller-Young ? whose academic focus is on black cultural studies, pornography and sex work ? came across a group of pro-life students with graphic anti-abortion signs and essentially became frenzied by the exhibit, leading a small mob of students to chant “tear down the sign” before she and two other students stormed off with one of the displays.

The scholar, who was pregnant at the time, then engaged in an altercation with a teenage prolife protester who had followed the educator to retrieve it. Much of the scuffle was caught on camera, and it left visible scratches on the young girl’s arms.

The “sex work” one, in particular, has importance to a libertarian issue: the criminalization of sex for money between consenting adults. Criminalization has led to all sorts of problems which should be studied and used as support to decriminalize.

“She was at the stage of a pregnancy when one is not fully one’s self fully, so the image of a severed fetus appeared threatening,” Eileen Boris, a UCSB history and black studies professor, wrote to the judge, according to papers filed with the court. “If she appears smiling on camera ? she is ‘wearing the mask,’ that is, she is hiding her actual state through a strategy of self-presentation that is a cultural legacy of slavery.”

As of next year, the Senate will be controlled by Republicans, as will the House. The fact that the Senate flipped to Republicans wasn’t necessarily surprising to advocates, but it was a frustrating reminder of the president’s decision to delay executive action on immigration. That move was meant to protect vulnerable red-state Democrats like Hagan, but most of them either lost anyway or are poised to lose. In Colorado, executive action could have boosted enthusiasm from Latino voters to the benefit of Udall. Instead, he lost to Republican Cory Gardner, whose immigration stances are far more conservative. The only tangible effect of the delay may have been the deportation of thousands of people who could have been helped by executive action.

“There was a political miscalculation from the administration that delaying executive action would help them save the Senate,” Lorella Praeli, advocacy director for the Dreamer advocacy group United We Dream, said at the watch party.

A new Economist/YouGov poll that was conducted just before the elections certainly showed that overall a large number of respondents are unhappy with Obama, but there was also a large number of Democrats who thought that Obama was so great that he deserves a third term.

The poll found that 39 percent of the Democrats surveyed wished that the 22nd Amendment that holds a president to only two terms didn’t exist so that Obama could run for a third term.

The number grows even higher with African-American respondents. Sixty-four percent said they’d love to see Obama get a third term.

This is why we need sortition to pick the candidates. Just select five jury-eligable people at random to be candidates from any given district and run a series of interviews so the electorate can find out their policy opinions.

That number is staggering when coupled with the open incompetence and dishonesty of this president.

That is the part that just confuses me. Yeah, Democrat partisans are going to support him no matter what. But by any reasonable standard (and not just from a nutty libertarian perspective) he is pretty unremarkable in his skills as a leader.

Yup. Some women respond to cat-callers, which is why it’s worth it for the men to do it, on the off chance that a given woman will pay attention to him. If it never worked, it would be less common. Cat calling is merely an aggressive sales tactic. Like a door-to-door salesman or a loud mall kiosk vendor. It’s annoying to most people, but it continues because it works some of the time.

Do they? I always figured it was more of a male bonding thing. I’m having a hard time imagining a woman stopping after being whistled at on the street or something and saying “I want to spend more time with that guy”. Maybe I have led too sheltered an existence.

It was an unusual breach of Washington decorum that stunned a political community used to the shadowy “background” comments from “senior administration officials” or “senior Senate aides.” In general, staffers do not say such things on the record about a sitting president, especially from the same party.

Krone’s move wasn’t some rogue operation of a staffer gone wild. He is a close and loyal aide to Reid, having met him years ago when he ? Krone ? was a telecommunications lobbyist and executive. He’s the rare senior congressional staffer who did the reverse move in the revolving door ? he made his millions on the outside, including a stint with Comcast, and then went into the public sector to work for Reid.

A federal judge put former Charlotte mayor and convicted felon Patrick Cannon under house arrest Thursday rather than sending him immediately to jail for casting an illegal ballot last week.

Cannon will be on home detention with electronic monitoring until Nov. 18, when he is scheduled to report to a West Virginia prison to begin a 44-month sentence for accepting bribes in an FBI sting.

Felons lose their right to vote, and North Carolina law considers it a new felony when they cast ballots anyway. By breaking the law, Cannon violated the terms of his bond and was subject to immediate incarceration.

U.S. District Judge Frank Whitney stopped short of that. Three weeks after he sentenced Cannon to prison, the judge chastised the 47-year-old Democrat for “causing further pain for our community.”

I can’t get worked up about this one. He had an outstanding warrant (for a stupid non-crime, but still) and cattle theft is something that happens. A calf in some guy’s car is probably reasonable for a cop to look into and they have to do something with it when they arrest the guy.

The Geffen plaza was completely deserted when they arrived, so the pair had time to grab coffee and return to take the first place in line, but only just enough?minutes after they returned, a few more shrewd faithfuls showed up to queue behind them. Six hours later, in the bright, summer-hot sun, the line would stretch around the block, but only the first 50 or so would be rewarded. Their dedication would earn them with a free tattoo, designed by artists set up for the weekend at HK Ink, a small pop-up shop at the heart of the warehouse space where only the most hard-core fans visiting the inaugural Hello Kitty Convention would be inked on a first-come, first-served basis.

More to the point, the only reason they’d actually put our a press release on this is if they wanted to (a) take credit for saving us all from some random thing or (b) justify the next mind-numbingly stupid piece of surveillance and/or fear-generation technology in their plan.

The Age of Obama may be over, but his presidency continues, alas. It’s pointless to engage in debates about whether he’s still “relevant.” He’s the president. That’s always relevant. From extraconstitutional power plays on immigration to na?ve and dangerous nuclear negotiations with Iran, his influence remains in very important ways.

It’s clear, though, that the Obama project has failed. He sought to alter the political trajectory of the country, to put it on a “fundamentally different path,” as Ronald Reagan had, to “restore faith in government,” and to “make government cool again.” It didn’t work, thanks to a series of scandals and six years of policy failures.

A few exit polls from last week make this clear. Nearly six years after the Obama administration’s $1 trillion stimulus, 22 percent of the electorate rate the current economy “poor” and 48 percent say “not so good.” Only 28 percent say the economy is “good,” and just 1 percent believe it’s “excellent.”

It’s clear, though, that the Obama project has failed. He sought to alter the political trajectory of the country, to put it on a “fundamentally different path,” as Ronald Reagan had, to “restore faith in government,” and to “make government cool again.” It didn’t work, thanks to a series of scandals and six years of policy failures.

Au contraire. His policies may have been disastrous to the short-term fortunes of his party, but that’s not what this guy cares about most.

He has been wildly successful in his goal of inflicting massive damage on the country that he hates more than almost any other. And he is in fact still the president, and he’s not done yet. There’s a lot more damage to inflict on us before it’s all said and done, and that’s exactly what he’s going to do.

It’s pretty laughable. He’s so mighty that he can’t swing a few GOP votes? Other presidents have done that. On the other side, Reagan, for instance, found ways to force or persuade Democrats to vote on his legislation.

Tauranga Crown Solicitor Greg Hollister-Jones “made the decision that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with the charge of attempting to procure a murder,” the prosecution office told the Los Angeles Times in a statement issued Friday afternoon, New Zealand time.